In those posts, I present some evidence to support Arnold Zwicky's suggestion that

…"there's" + <plural noun phrase> should really be characterized, in current English, as merely informal/colloquial, rather than nonstandard. Millions of people (like me) who wouldn't use "there is two people at the door" are entirely happy with "there's two people at the door".

The same thing seems to be true of "here's" — thus today's Google News returns these counts:

here is a few

6

here's a few

256

here are a few

684

here're a few

1

As for why this is true, I don't have a good answer. The obvious answers (like "It's hard to pronounce the re-articulated /r/ sounds in there're) seem like post-hoc rationalizations to me — the rhyming part of there're is exactly the same as error and terror, at least for many speakers, and there's no evidence that those words are disfavored as a result.

74 Comments

Lazar said,

Maybe there's something to TL's suggestion that "there's" is easier to say. My impression is that the sequence /ɹǝɹ/, as found in a quickly spoken "there are", is a laborious one to articulate – look at all the Americans who collapse "mirror" into a monosyllabic "meer". "There are" can't be similarly collapsed without swallowing the verb.

I agree with Lazar. Practically nobody says "February" the way it is spelled, and virtually all the conductors on the trains I ride every day say "Swathmore", not "Swarthmore". Having two "r's" close to another in a word tends to cause one of them to get swallowed up. And "February" and "Swarthmore" do not even have the harder to pronounce sequence /ɹǝɹ/, where the two "r's" are right next to each other, that Lazar is talking about.

Paul Frederick said,

Ellen K. said,

I think there's (in addition to the pronunciation stuff noted) there's an element of taking "there's" and "here's" as a unit. Which, okay, happens with "there is" too, but it's stronger in the contracted forms. The verb looses it's identity and thus doesn't need to be conjugated.

Michael Cargal said,

I use "there's" not because "there're" is harder to say but because I grew up hearing and using it. In my family and crowd, it was normal spoken English. The plural "there's" is similar to the singular "they" in that sense. A non-linguist native speaker with descriptionist sensibilities wonders what the problem is. It is now normal speech and will become standard writing one retirement at a time.

Of this use of ‘there’s’ ‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ says ‘the structure is working its way into the standard. It seems to be evolving into a fixed phrase, rather like French “C’est”, serving the ongoing discourse rather than the grammar of the sentence.’

I generally agree with Barrie's comment above that 'there's' and 'here's' seem to be becoming fixed phrases. One thing that I think may help their spread is the tendency to start a sentence not quite sure of what you're going to say. I wonder how often a person starts a sentence with 'there's' thinking of a singular but then switches to a plural and doesn't go back to correct the 'there's'. People exposed to such input would then construct a language in which there is an invariable contraction for a variable copula.

The use of 'here's' and 'there's' as the defaults can only be helped by a feedback loop in which they along with the non-contracted forms are more common, possibly leading more and more speakers to adopt the invariable contraction. A quick check of 'here is' + 'here's' versus 'here are' in COCA yields 20k+30k vs 10k (+ a negligible amount of 'here're').

The phonetic arguments seem specious to me.

I'm sure there are similar phenomena in many languages. One similar example in Arabic is with the copula used with the existential particle fii. Spoken dialects can have an invariable copula where Standard Arabic demands agreement.

(Disclaimer: I haven't looked at corpora so I can't compare the frequencies in Standard and colloquial varieties but I have a pretty strong intuition in each case.)

Jeff Johnson said,

It seems interesting in this context to consider the case of Spanish, which uses the single word "hay" to express both "there is" and "there are". I think the word 'hay' is considered an impersonal verb.

Conceptually when "there's" is being used this way it seems almost as if "there" becomes the subject of "to be", and "cookies" becomes the object.

Bessel Dekker said,

Surely "aren't" has nothing to do with this (except in the spelling)? As I understand it, the development was as follows:
1."am not" > "amn't" (ordinary weak form)
2. "amn't" > "a:nt" (late 17th ct., when "a" was still comparatively open, and the "mn" cluster becoming "n" may have caused compensatory lengthening
3. [a:nt] could be spelt "aren't" in a non-rhotic accent (Southern British).

Lindsay marshall said,

I was just about to post about amn't, and I find an ongoing discussion. I almost always say amn't I and almost never say aren't I – but I'm a Scot. My English wife and children think it is weird. But they also laugh at the way I say oven. I also say February as it s written.

On pronouncing mirror, the Geordies tend to say mirro and drop the last r. Drives me nuts.

SlideSF said,

While It's true that saying "there're" is no more difficult to say than "error" (or "mirror"), it's also true that most people, in informal speech, will say "err" (and "mere"). Post-hoc or not, it's just easier to pronounce one syllable than two repeating ones.

Andy Averill said,

I'm guessing it's because in speech we often start talking before we've completely formulated what we're going to say. (We [or at least I] do the same thing in writing too, but in speech there's no Backspace key.)

So if you're going to talk about the existence or presence of something, you might say there's before you've decided whether the thing you're talking about is singular or plural.

There's beer in the cooler.
There's beer — and soda — in the cooler.

Now you could argue that educated people only do this accidentally. But I think it's clear that casual speech even among the educated has become increasingly less concerned with grammatical niceties (which I'm sure has been discussed here before). So it's not a very big jump to just using there's most of the time, even in casual writing, such as internet comments.

Ellen K. said,

Bessel Dekker, that doesn't really explain it. After all, we don't (in contemporary English) say or write "I aren't", and we don't say or write "am not I" (it's "am I not"). So, if it's simply a contraction of "am not" with no influence from the contraction of "are not", why do we only see it in questions, as "aren't I"?

Zeppelin said,

I figure it's become universal for "exists" regardless of number in some varieties through the conflation of phrase pairs like "there's a lot"-"there are lots">"there's lots", similar to, say, "what it looks like"-"how it looks">"how it looks like". The number distinction doesn't really add any information, so I can see why it'd get rationalised away.

I have no evidence for any of this, of course.

Jeroen Mostert said,

Constructs like "here're" and "there're" don't seem hard to pronounce at all, despite their awkward appearance — you pronounce them exactly like "here are" and "there are" when you are not clearly (or excessively) articulating. The idea that "here's" and "there's" exist only because they're substituting for them doesn't wash, in my terribly uninformed, non-linguistic, non-native-speakerly opinion.

@Victor: The idea of "rationalization" is silly. I use "here's" and "there's" for plural liberally, but never "here is" and "there is", to which your rationalization should equally apply. I do not "succumb" to using "here's" because I think I've got a good reason, but because I consider it correct. "Here's a few things to consider" is not even peculiar in my mind, while "here is a few things" is flat-out wrong because of the singular/plural disagreement. In my language, "here's" is simply not equivalent to "here is" in all circumstances (and so it can't really be called a contraction, in the way "can't" and "cannot" can always be interchanged with only a shift in tone rather than meaning).

J.W. Brewer said,

"Swathmore" is an odd one because local phononology is typically rhotic. Saying "Uppuh Dahby" wouldn't make you sound posh; it would make you sound like the young Ben Franklin just arrived from Boston. The there's/there're issue can be sidestepped by the archaic usage seen in e.g. "Here there be dragons." You might think revival would be impossible except for the intermittent internet fashion for Talk-like-a-Pirate Day, which means ordinary modern AmEng speakers would be perfectly capable of typing or even saying "There be cookies involved, me hearties. Arrrrr."

Grover Jones said,

Pflaumbaum said,

The euphony theory ought to predict that non-rhotic people are more likely to use there's with a plural complement when the word immediately following it begins with a vowel, which is where it would be in competition with [ðɛːrər] or similar. Assuming that no-one is arguing that [ðɛːrə] is also hard to pronounce.

So on blogs and forums primarily frequented by English, Australians etc., you'd expect to find, say, there's eight more often than there's nine if the theory was right.

Joseph Devney said,

I think the characterization of the end of the word as /ɹǝɹ/ is not correct. Using that pronunciation is saying "there are" quickly, not consciously using a contraction. "There're" would end in /rʔr/, and the glottal stop is what makes it more difficult to articulate than "there's."

julie lee said,

As my first language was Chinese and Chinese doesn't distinguish between singular and plural in verbs ( "is" "are" are both "shi是“, "there is" "there are" are both ”you有" ), I often automatically use English "is" even where it should be "are". It was because of such grammatical complexities in English that I had a heck of a time learning it when I was eight. Why couldn't it be as simple as Chinese ?*!!

Lazar said,

@Joseph Devney: I suppose a glottal stop might be optional for me, but I wouldn't parse "there're" as sounding any different from "there are" – I view it as a phonologically unnecessary contraction along the lines of "would've".

David Morris said,

Australian English is less rhotic, in that most speakers would not pronounce the 'r' on the end of 'there', but many, perhaps most, would use a 'linking r' in 'there are'.
This is the sort of point that when it crops up, I say, "Hang on, I've never particularly thought about it, and never particularly paid attention to what I say or anyone else around me says". I really couldn't be sure what I say.
A similar point cropped up as part of my masters course, in the context of present perfect plural 'have' becoming singular 'has' when contracted: the example given was 'There's always been songs about sex and death'. Everyone agreed that 'There have …' (uncontracted) was 'correct', but I remember that opinion was divided about 'there's' in this sentence.
As an ESL teacher, I often say: 'Rule number one is: Make Sense'. There's nothing nonsensical or ambiguous about 'there's' in the pattern under discussion.
(I usually go on to say 'And the best way of making sense is to use standard vocabulary, standard grammar, standard pronunciation and standard spelling'. I am not completely without standards.)

Michael C said,

This reminds me of a time I was speaking to a thankfully former colleague,

There is…. 4 of them I think.

I recieved a castigating look and was asked to repeat myself. Which I did, with the same grammatical 'slip' because I knew it pissed her off.

The way I 'rationalise' this to myself is that I wasn't aware of the number when I began the sentence, and I'm used to using it just as a set phrase to introduce a noun. I would say few people would come out with 'the students is learning'. Incidentally, I tend to pronounce this existential there is just as a 'zzz' in normal. 'There is' doesn't really make any sense anyway if you think about it.

Peter said,

> the rhyming part of there're is exactly the same as error and terror

At least for me (a fairly RP Brit), this isn’t the case in any context I can think of. When unreduced, the vowel of “there” is longer than the first vowels of “error” and “terror”; and when reduced, it goes to a schwa, which neither “error” nor “terror” does. I would have thought this is standard among Brits?

ThomasH said,

FWIW the Spanish equivalent, "hay" ("there is/there are" and the equivalents for other tenses) does not take plural forms for plural. objects. If Google Translate is to be trsted, neither does French, Portugese, Catalan, Romanian, but Latin and Italian do.

Jeroen Mostert said,

@David: I think "The Elements" muddies the waters a bit because the elements are mass nouns. "There are antimony, arsenic, aluminum and soforthium" just seems wrong unless Antimony, Arsenic and Aluminum are your unconventionally named cats. However, "there is antimony, arsenic, aluminum" seems just fine to me, unlike "there is a few ideas".

ThomasH said,

As for the reeason, I'd speculate that "hay" is a shortened from of "he aqui ("I have here") an archaic form from when "haber" was still an ordinary verb before it became an auxillary and "tener" expanded from to include .

——————–
PS "Amn't" is even more common in Ireland than Scotland, since as well as "amn't I?" we say "I amn't" where Scots say "I amnae". Noteworthy that Irish and Scottish Englishes don't have "ain't" and its associated opprobrium.

maidhc said,

"Amn't I" was collapsed to "Ain't I", a usage that lasted through the late 19th century or a little later (e.g., Lord Peter Wimsey, but I'm not sure now if he used it consistently). But people started saying "Ain't he" as well, which is clearly incorrect, so "ain't" got banned entirely. But then what to substitute? "Amn't I" is hard to say, "aren't I" is clearly incorrect, because we don't say "I are".

Mark Mandel said,

@Ellen K., we don't say "I aren't" because there's no need for it: we can say "I'm not", and we do, all the time. There's no such alternative available when the pronoun follows the verb and is separated from it by the negator.

@Faldone: That's not really equivalent. The English cognates, "It gives a ball," and "It gives ten thousand balls," are both grammatically correct—although they are likely nonsensical, because English doesn't have the "es gibt" idiom. In an "es gibt" construction, the subject is "es," whereas in, "There is a ball," the subject is "a ball," and it (normally) governs the form of the verb.

I grew up with the mary-marry-merry merger, and for me, barer, nearer, here're/hearer, there're, and error/terror each seem to have different final vowels, though that may be the influence of the preceding vowels. I can't pin down what the difference is, although the first several are between a very fast ar and a very fast ur and the last has a very fast or. None have glottal stops.

SlideSF,

I also grew up with the mirror/mere and our/are mergers, which are widespread but not universal in America. But not error/err.

Saskia said,

In Australia with the "r-less" ends to words, saying "there're" is actually phonetically identical (as far as I can tell) with saying "there are". We do still use "there's" in plural situations here as well. I just thought that was an interesting phonetic distinction, not sure if it has any effect on the ratio of usages here in Australia.
Saskia

Saskia said,

Ellen K. said,

Mark Mandel, you're missing my point. It doesn't matter why we don't say "I aren't". The fact that we don't say it means that Bessel Dekker's explanation, if correct, is incomplete as stated. It doesn't indicate in what phrase the "aren't" (non-rhotic) contraction for "am not" comes from. If it comes from "I am not", why do we no longer use that contraction there? If it comes from use in a question, that would mean we once upon a time said "am not I?" even though we don't now.

It seems like there's something deeper going on when I allow myself to say "there's" when I "mean" to say "there're" and I can't quite put my finger on it. When I've noticed it among the very educated, it's almost as if it's a sort of semi-conscious ironic usage. I apologize for not being more clear in explaining what I mean, but maybe someone will catch my drift anyway, and better state it.

Jeroen Mostert said,

@lthrogmo: he shouldn't be, since I gave a non-offensive reason why I thought so: it doesn't apply to me. Therefore, to me, the idea seems silly, like being told "see, here's how you think". Then again, by Victor's own admission these are "moot points", and by my own admission I am not a linguist, so we're probably OK.

Milan N. said,

As Faldone mentioned the German equivalent is "Es gibt". (literally "It gives" Strange enough when you think about it.) It is not conjugated according number. The common explanation, i.e. what we are told in school, is that the "es" is the subject of the sentence, not that what is said to be there.
I guess this reasonable, because here the "es" can't be left out, as it is the case with other dummy pronouns:

John Walden said,

Is it called "Proximal Agreement" when a nearby (apparent) singular like "a few" or "a lot" produces a singular verb, though it shouldn't according to Notional Agreement?

I wonder if this would be supported by any tendency for "a lot of" to be followed by a singular uncount noun and "lots of" by a plural. I'm not saying that this is the case but it wouldn't surprise me if it were. Certainly "there's a lot of it" outgoogles "there's lots of it".

Milan N. said,

@Adrian: This is certainly not true in my northern variety, though it might be presented this way in some prescriptivist or learner's grammars. "Es sind" needs a referent. "Es sind Kekse" (Those (literally: it) are cookies) thus could be the answer to the question what one is eating. While maybe Heidegger could use it in the sense of "Es gibt", to my knowledge no competent native speaker would do so.

David Morris said,

@Jeroen: I think the principle is the same whether we are talking about:
There's [plural countable noun]
There's [list of singular countable nouns]
There's [list of mass nouns]

I have a little bit of trouble pronouncing too many r's in close proximity. I have to think carefully about pronouncing 'terrorist' or 'terrorism'. Although I usually use a linking 'r' in eg 'mother_and father', I *think* I would not use it in eg 'the terror / is …' (though it's hard to think of a real-life example).

Mark F. said,

The thing about the "too hard to say" argument is that violating our personal grammars isn't what we usually do when something is hard to say. We just reduce.

But perhaps "There two people at the door" sounded more wrong to people than "There's two people".

The fact that a lot of people say it just because it's grammatical for them doesn't really address the question of how it got that way. Pronunciation issues or something else could have played a role in the past.

Ellen K. said,

No one has claimed that "there're" is too hard to say. The only person who said "too hard to say", other than attributing it to others, was referring to "amn't I". Saying something is hard to pronounce is not the same as saying it's too hard to say.

Jerry Friedman said,

In northern New Mexico, I hear a lot of people use singular forms of be in any situation with existential there. "How many is there? There was at least ten, but there isn't so many any more. I can't tell exactly how many there is now." This seems to be what The Ridger hears too, but not what Arnold Zwicky and others say.

As people have said, in standard Spanish existential haber doesn't inflect for number (because the thing whose existence is asserted is the direct object, as in los hay), but some non-standard speakers use plural forms in tenses other than the present. I'm hoping to hear someone who says both "there was ten" and "hubieron diez"—for my life list.

Ted said,

BZ said,

I don't understand why you dismiss the pronunciation difficulty hypothesis. For me, unless I'm being hypercareful, "here're" becomes indistinguishable from "here". "Mirror" becomes "mirr", which is not a problem because "mirr" is not a word. As for error/err, I usually pronounce the first vowel differently in those two words, and even if I hadn't, it is perfectly clear from context. And for some reason "There cookies involved" just doesn't sound right.

As an aside, I am mildly annoyed at people who say "feb-you-are-ee" when they mean "febrrry". I am more than mildly annoyed when they *spell* it "Febuary".

That's almost a tie, for an "ungrammatical" construction exactly parallel to "there's a few" without the pronunciation difficulty hypothesis to fall back on.

My explanation is that as adverb-verb-subject word order dies, crystallized expressions are getting re-analyzed in a way that treats adverbs such as "here" or "there" as essentially pronouns, acting as singular subjects for verbs in constructions introducing direct objects, parallel to "il y a" or "es gibt", mentioned above.

Bloix said,

I think that people simply don't conceptualize the sentence as "there" being the object.

"There's two people at the door" might originally have been "two people are there at the door."

But I don't think people think of the sentences that way any more. No one thinks of the "there" as implying a physical place. In fact, someone could even say, "There's two people over there," which would make no sense if it meant, "Two people are there over there."

If you ask someone, what's the subject of sentence "There's two people at the door," I expect that the answer you'll get is "there."

BTW, like the Spanish "hay," Hebrew has a word, "yesh," that functions this way. Yesh means "there is" or "there are" and is often used as the first word in a sentence.

Bloix said,

I think that people simply don't conceptualize the sentence as "there" being the object.

"There's two people at the door" might originally have been "two people are there at the door."

But I don't think people think of the sentences that way any more. No one thinks of the "there" as implying a physical place. In fact, someone could even say, "There's two people over there," which would make no sense if it meant, "Two people are there over there."

If you ask someone, what's the subject of sentence "There's two people at the door," I expect that the answer you'll get is "there."

BTW, like the Spanish "hay," Hebrew has a word, "yesh," that functions this way. Yesh means "there is" or "there are" and is often used as the first word in a sentence.

Bloix said,

And Craig., I think, is on to something – in modern colloquial English, word order is much more invariate than in older or more formal English. My children have a much harder time reading Shakespeare than I do, not only because of the vocabulary but because of word order. Shakespeare often relies on grammar to communicate which word is the subject and which the object, while modern English almost always relies on word order. Nowadays anything other than subject-verb-object is poetic or high-falutin.

Darekun said,

Re "here comes a few" vs "here come a few", I've heard it described as a Commonwealth vs American English trait — on the one side there's only one few, on the other side "a few" is functioning as a number. I hear both used on both sides of the pond, but certainly both are seen as correct by some.

Re pronunciation of "there're" and its kin, among SoCal denizens my use of them is marked, and I certainly don't pronounce "there're" the same as either "there are" or "there". I'd compare it to the double vowels of Japanese, just with the /r/ a bit further down in sonority. Trying to find an /lr/ pair, the first that comes to mind is "y'all're", which indeed feels fine(at least phonotactically), whereas "there're" feels somewhat grating, ending with /rr/. I also pronounce February like "febbr-wary", though.

Robert said,

As an Australian educated in the 60s we were taught to say Feb-roo-ary. Feb-you-ary was considered a sign of lower class or poor education, it still drives my mother spare – always a good test for local peeve probability.
While my 'there' is, for here, standardly non-rhotic I think my 'there're' would be a doubly rhotic rr but I don't think I've ever said it. While I can say it it feels odd in the mouth, I would always use 'there are'.

David Walker said,

@Jerry Friedman: In southern New Mexico, I wouldn't dream of saying "How many is there"! If I heard that, or the rest of your examples, I would assume the speaker was uneducated. That kind of talk isn't common around here, and I don't believe it's common around Albuquerque or Santa Fe. How far north do you consider northern New Mexico?

Martha said,

Adrian said: The plural form of "es gibt" is "es sind", though "es gibt" is commonly used with plurals.
Milan N. said: This is certainly not true in my northern variety, though it might be presented this way in some prescriptivist or learner's grammars.

When I studied German, we only learned "es gibt," so unless I had a series of unorthodox books and teachers, it doesn't seem to me to be prescriptivist grammar. I don't know that I've seen my Bavarian pen pal using "es sind," but now I'm going to look out for it.

I agree with Darekun, that there're and there don't seem to be pronounced correctly (or terror/tear, horror/whore), but rather that the former has a long r.